


mine forever, just in case it exists

by racingincircles



Series: everybody knows (you're my sickness and the cure) [1]
Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: ...and now it's a five-shot dear lord, Coffeeverse, Complicated Relationships, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Getting Back Together, Malcola, POV changes at the end, Post-Canon Fix-It, Vulnerability, dad!Malc owns my soul, gratuitous references to their height difference and her freckles (you're all welcome), inevitable references to Jamie and Sam, more like post-post-canon fix-it-again, response fic, seriously ungodly amounts of it, this went from one-shot to three-shot to four-shot because Malc doesn't shut up and neither do I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:06:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28516137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racingincircles/pseuds/racingincircles
Summary: If an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, what does a heart for a heart do? For Malcolm and Nicola, it just left each of them with gaping holes in their chests that only the other could repair, and even after everything they’ve put each other through, Malcolm’s at a loss for why he ever thought otherwise.
Relationships: Nicola Murray/Malcolm Tucker
Series: everybody knows (you're my sickness and the cure) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088924
Comments: 40
Kudos: 20





	1. have we been here before?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quietbatpeople](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietbatpeople/gifts), [dickovny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dickovny/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Taste Your Coffee Thin Lips Once More](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1179170) by [Tricki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tricki/pseuds/Tricki). 



> Alright gang, here we go. The only way I ever recover from a fic that ruins my life is by writing more fic based on it.
> 
> Please for the sake of context only read this if you've read the Coffeeverse (or so I've nicknamed it for concision purposes). The idea for this response fic was already brewing before @quietbatpeople, one of my fellow Malcola Headcanon Machines, suggested a post-Coffeeverse project detailing how other characters react to the ending. This first installment tackles more than just that, though.
> 
> I decided to make this a series rather than one massive multi-chapter fic. Cross all your fingers that I actually finish it. It shouldn't be too tall an order since this one gets most of the complex emotional heaviness out of the way early, as it should for Malcola's sake. These two disasters, I swear.
> 
> Rated for canon-typical language.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She knows him just as wholly and completely as he knows her. Three years apart diminished none of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from Been Here Before by The Brummies (who are not English despite their name). Highly recommend listening to the song.

She’s looking everywhere, and he’s just looking at her.

Nicola’s taking in every bit of the house as if it’s her first time here, as if they were building their relationship from scratch instead of reviving it, and Malcolm can see her eyes linger on certain minutiae like that one consistently creaky floorboard and the front window curtains he’s had since before they were together. He rifles through the Rolodex of Nicola Murray Memories he had tried (but sometimes failed) to leave untouched in the recesses of his brain for three years, and he’s fairly certain he can hear every thought and see every image running through her head the moment it does.

He realises that she must have been roundly barraged with many of the same memories three weeks ago when she came here by herself at her own insistence, when the odds of rekindling what they had still appeared far below zero.

Guilt rises in the back of his throat. She put herself through that _for him_ after he was a right horrendous bastard to her at the hospital. Vitriol wasn’t even a sufficient self-defense mechanism; he’s not proud of any of the shit he said. And he still handed her his house keys at the end of it.

But the ensuing chain of events had culminated, less than an hour ago, in Malcolm and Nicola snogging each other senseless on Westminster Bridge after dredging up their messy history with an especially inflamed version of their standard-issue shouting matches, not giving a flying fuck that they were surrounded by passersbys who did not ask for this spectacle on their evening commutes.

The photo she’d left in his jacket pocket wouldn’t have sent him literally running back to her office if he hadn’t still fucking loved her, and they both knew it, but he’d still been loath to swallow his pride and admit it until she’d yelled at him to just _move on from this_ or she’d stop waiting for him. He hadn’t realised she was. He hadn’t wanted to think about it. He hadn’t wanted to glean any hope from her decision to rush to the hospital at the behest of Wendy and Sam.

(Bloody intuitive Sam. More than a decade has passed since it was her job to know what Malcolm needed without being asked. Old habits don’t die hard. Oftentimes they don’t die at all. He probably owes Sam a thank-you and a bottle of riesling, though. He doubts his sister, on the other hand, will let him get a word in edgewise once she finds out about this.)

He’d stanched Nicola’s rant with a desperate kiss, daring to consider for the first time since their separation that putting themselves back together was a real possibility. Or rather, putting _each other_ back together, because they’d tried it individually and just wound up worse for wear — physically in Malcolm’s case, but emotionally in both their cases.

Once he’d taken the leap of faith that came with kissing her, there was only one logical next step, and that too had rested on him.

_“Come home with me, pet.”_

_“Home?”_

_“Yeah, home.”_

She’d rewarded him with yet another kiss before taking his arm and pulling him back in the direction of Westminster, a place that, much like Nicola, he’s never been able to shake off despite his best efforts.

Before they got into his car, Nicola had called Gillian — and made Malcolm talk to her as well — to let her and the rest of the staff know that she wouldn't be back in the office until tomorrow morning but not to worry, everything was fine, she and her ex hadn’t murdered each other. Neither of them told Gilly they were no longer exes, possibly because it was still so fresh, and Malcolm is ninety-nine percent certain Nicola’s staff immediately proceeded to place bets on the status of their relationship. After all, his own colleagues had bet on the length of his sick leave and whether he would survive it, and they’re not nearly as tight-knit as the senior staff of the Department of Health and Social Care. If history holds up, Malcolm guesses, Cathy’s probably the most likely besides Gilly to rake in the cash from their proverbial pool, and Chris and Andy will probably have to empty their wallets.

Office crisis averted, Malcolm and Nicola had proceeded to head straight to his house — no, _their_ house, because it never stopped being theirs in either of their minds — and while it was far from their handsiest or their most impatient car ride home, there was a familiar yet new and earnestly buzzing energy between them the entire time. She hadn’t taken her eyes off him, as if she were afraid he would vanish if she looked away. He had kept his right hand on the steering wheel and his left on her knee, reacclimating his fingers to the shape of it, not that they’d ever fully forgotten. The necessity of keeping his eyes on the road aside, he hadn’t shared her anxiety that this might be a joint hallucination. He hadn’t felt this present, this real since before he ended things with her.

She took off her heels the second she came in and deposited her coat on the couch like she’d never left. Without the coat, he can see the darker of the two freckles on her collarbones peeking out from behind the collar of her blouse when she turns a certain direction. Nicola hadn’t thought much of those freckles before they were together, before he made a point of worshipping them with his lips every chance he got. Now Malcolm wonders if the sight of them in the mirror has been tugging at her heart for three years.

The guilt hasn’t subsided, and it doesn’t appear to be heading that direction. He finally allows himself to hate that he hurt her, even though she hurt him first. He’s sick of justifying it. If an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, what does a heart for a heart do? For Malcolm and Nicola, it just left each of them with gaping holes in their chests that only the other could repair, and even after everything they’ve put each other through, Malcolm’s at a loss for why he ever thought otherwise.

He returns to more pleasant thoughts and lets his gaze linger on the magenta pencil skirt he told her was “way too fucking loud” just for old times’ sake in her office. Then wasn’t the right time for him to start admiring her arse again, and now isn’t ideal either, but he’s never really been able to stop himself and she never really minded once they were together. He hopes those are stockings instead of tights underneath that skirt. She used to wear the former exclusively because she knew he greatly appreciated them on her and even more greatly appreciated taking them _off_ her. He has no reason to expect that she’s wearing them now, or that she still wears them at all. Maybe they remind her too much of him. Fuck.

The overhead light catches a few of the grey hairs poking out from the camouflage of the dye job that needs an update in the same shade of brunette she’s always been. He noticed them on the bridge but wasn’t in a position, like he is now, to wish he’d seen more of the evolution of those greys. Surely she has more to cover up now than she did three years ago. He wonders what her hair will look like when she just lets it go silver, and he’s suddenly enormously glad he won’t miss out on that. She won’t initially believe she can pull it off, but he’ll do his best to convince her. She’s not ancient yet. She’s only fifty-eight.

(He’s approaching sixty-five, and his coworkers thankfully have enough self-preservation not to mention the word _retirement_ anywhere in his vicinity. He hopes his recent hospitalisation hasn't made anyone brave enough to risk that particular bollocking.)

As she traverses the house that he’s all but told her is officially theirs again, she keeps glancing at him to make sure he’s still there, still watching her. When he’s certain she’s sufficiently distracted by the selection of books on his bookshelf, which has hardly changed since they broke up, he lifts a hand to his right jawline and brushes it with his fingers, prepared for the residual sting.

He deserved that slap she dealt him on the bridge. Not just for how he’d spoken to her, or for his decision not to speak to her for ages. She didn't throw his scheming that caused her humiliating resignation back in his face just for the hell of it. He’d been good to her for eight years, but before and after that he’d been utterly awful. It wasn’t right, and it’s about fucking time he _cared_ that it wasn’t right.

Nicola’s (hopefully) stocking-clad feet pad into the kitchen, retracing well-traveled paths, and Malcolm's eyes again follow hers around the room. The faucet that burst more than once, to their mutual exasperation. The magnets on the refrigerator door that used to hold grocery lists, phone bills and other mundane fragments of the Murray-Tucker household that once was.

The countertop just to the right of the stove where twelve years ago, just days after the Goolding inquiry and his arrest, he’d wordlessly pressed his body against hers and kissed her.

She had expected nothing of the sort when she barged in and cooked dinner for the Cassius to her Caesar, all better judgment aside, but she had kissed him back, and for a few sweet seconds they had no reason to hate each other. Their first kiss had been years earlier, and their first kiss that meant the same thing to both of them wouldn’t come for another year or so. But their brief encounter here in the kitchen was still their first kiss in this house. In their _home_. The home in which Malcolm somehow kept living among all these memories, maybe just to spite them, by himself for three years.

In the first year after the breakup, he thought more than once about moving but always dismissed the idea as letting Nicola defeat him. Even when they weren’t speaking, he still felt sometimes like they were at each other’s throats.

So he stayed among the infernal memories and fought them every day to the point he almost always won. He would normally take pride in his own apparent strength, compare himself to fucking Hercules, but guilt and weariness have replaced that pride. Besides, if he remembers his mythology correctly, the mighty Hercules killed his wife, Megara, in a fit of madness (that soppy Disney film be damned).

Nicola’s eyes make their way back to Malcolm, who can’t help but think she belongs in his — their — kitchen again even if her facial expression indicates she doesn’t yet feel that way. The corners of his mouth turn upward before he breaks the silence.

“It’s been too fuckin’ quiet here without yeh.”

Her face softens a bit: noticeably less anxious, but still in need of reassurance. “Has it?” she says almost timidly.

“It has.” He can't remember the last time he spoke this gently, but he’s willing to meet her where she’s at. “I used to listen to yeh sing in the shower.”

“I know,” she replies. “I still do that sometimes.”

 _Sometimes._ The implications of that word make his heart twinge, and his almost-smile threatens to falter. “Course yeh do.”

He gave her a fair amount of space as she explored, but after they didn’t stop touching between their frenetic lip-locking on the bridge and the second they shut the front door behind them, having a few meters between them now is starting to feel awkward.

Nicola shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and Malcolm senses she is about ten seconds from taking a few tentative steps closer to him. He decides he needs to get something off his chest first.

“You were right.”

She stops fidgeting. “When?”

“On the bridge. When we were shoutin’ at each other. It was—” He takes a deep breath and repeats her words from earlier. “— _deeply fucking personal_ when I forced yer resignation.”

She gives him a slight raise of her eyebrows that urges him to keep talking. He does without a second thought.

“And now look at us. We repeated history, didn’t we? 2012 all fuckin’ over again. You let me down, I retaliated and twisted the knife so fucking hard we both ended up sufferin' for it, except I had the brilliant fucking fortune to end up in gaol the first time and in hospital the second. And you—”

He’s not ranting or bollocking her or raising his voice, but he feels strangely out of breath. The past three years, the eight before that and the four before _that_ have all been catching up to him continuously over the last few weeks, and he can’t run from them anymore.

He can categorise his life into distinct phases since Nicola Murray MP sauntered into the DoSAC office in the summer of 2009 wearing a vivid floral dress that he actually liked on her, even though he never told her so. Not once has she actively _tried_ to alter his life so profoundly, nor has he ever seen it coming. They’d both been none the wiser that she was instigating phase four when she marched into his hospital room.

 _This one better fucking last,_ he thinks.

“You came back for me both times, even though I’d thrown yeh to the wolves.” Verbalising this reality is something close to a catharsis. It’s not something Malcolm has felt often in six and a half decades. “Even though yeh had every right to hate me for it."

Nicola crosses her arms and examines the tiled floor. "Not every right. Not the second time. The other way around, actually."

Of course she’s decided to argue with him, the familiarity of it and her own guilt acting in unison. Christ, was it really less than a month ago that still knowing her so well made him feel nauseated, and it wasn’t just the ulcer talking?

"And look where that fuckin' got me, darling. Gaol was shite, but at least I didn’t almost die there.” He looks away from her momentarily and runs a hand over his face, willing himself to articulate what she unintentionally forced him to acknowledge three weeks ago. “That’s not even my point here. Look, yeh showed up at my two lowest moments. Yeh showed up when I _needed_ yeh. I wouldn't've admitted it at gunpoint, tried to convince yeh otherwise both times, but it was still true. And you knew that when I didn’t."

Nicola looks back up at him, and he pauses in case she has a response. She doesn’t. She knows he’s not done. She knows his rare moments of vulnerability make him long-winded despite himself. She knows him just as wholly and completely as he knows her. Three years apart diminished none of that, hence the nagging little voice in his head that’s been trying to tell him since the hospital how sodding _foolish_ he was to think he could just let her go and be done with her forever.

He was foolish. Now he’s tired. He’ll more readily admit the latter out loud.

“Pretending I didn’t need yeh or love yeh anymore was just fucking exhausting, pet. I didn’t know that ‘til just recently.” He remembers something from his first day back at the office that feels like much longer ago than a handful of hours, and he lets out an almost humorless guffaw. “Today at work I caught myself thinkin’ I was gonna come home to yeh. Little did I fucking know.”

He defies his own expectations and takes a step toward her. She finds her voice as he does.

“You’re preaching to the fucking choir, Malcolm.” Nicola’s voice falters over his name as if she’s getting used to saying it out loud again, and her emerald eyes start to glisten with the beginnings of tears. Those eyes, damn them, have appeared countless times in Malcolm’s dreams since he left her, and he would wake up more miffed each time because _why wouldn’t they just leave him the fuck alone already_ and he could not, would not admit he missed them dearly, just like everything else about this relentless catastrophe of a woman.

“I tried to — pretend, too, but I stopped,” Nicola continues, stumbling over words she has undoubtedly kept bottled up for too long. “I don’t know when. I just accepted at some point that it wasn’t fucking working and it wasn’t going to fucking work. I mean, sure, I knew I didn’t have the _right_ to still love you after what I did, but I’d already paid for it, and—”

Malcolm has been waiting for the floodgates to open since the moment he threw caution to the wind and kissed her on the bridge. She’d managed to hold herself together impressively until now, when the weight of the past three years seems to come crashing down on her. A sob escapes her, a hand flies to her face, a few tears form on her lashes, and Malcolm Tucker will be damned if he doesn’t catch her when she’s falling.

He closes the distance between them in two strides and enfolds her in the arms that should never have let her go. Without her heels, her head doesn’t reach his shoulder, so she settles it against the center of his chest, her right ear pressed to his sternum just like in happier days. She doesn’t stop sobbing, and Malcolm figures too late that hearing his heartbeat might be the opposite of comforting, instead a reminder of what she almost lost forever. But she responds with a viselike grip he has no intention of loosening just yet.

He feels like he should say something, but she’s always had the unique ability to render him speechless. He instead runs a hand up and down her back soothingly, and a soft “Nic’la” slips from his mouth involuntarily.

They’re not picking up where they left off. That’s never been an option. But it’s becoming increasingly clear to Malcolm, and probably to Nicola as well, that starting over isn’t an option either. Not after all this time.

Not when it’s still so easy to just hold each other like this.


	2. if it gets better (then at least we'll know)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I thought I knew yeh. Thought I had yeh figured out. Thought we’d been together long enough fer that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes numerous throwbacks to chapters 1 and 6 of the Coffeeverse (even though the latter is a torture chamber), as well as Tricki's one-shot "You Among All Beings Have The Right To See Me Weak," which is set just after 3x08 and the iconic "stay" moment. I firmly believe most of Tricki's one-shots fit into both the Coffeeverse and the Nationalverse (or so I call their other multi-chapter angst-fest that has also ruined my life).
> 
> Chapter title from Need Your Presence by The Coronas.

If they stand here like this forever, Malcolm’s fine with it. He’s got three years to make up for.

She smells so fucking good. Sweet and spicy and wonderfully  _ Nicola. _ He dips his head so he can kiss the top of hers, and he thinks her next sob might also be a shiver.

He waits until her breathing steadies and then waits a little longer before taking the plunge.

“D’you want to stay?”

It’s a genuine question, with an open-ended answer as far as Malcolm is concerned, because if he’s going to fully trust her again like he’s aiming to, he’s going to leave her own choices up to her instead of commandeering them like he did when he dictated where her daughter should go to school, when he persuaded her not to take the job in Connecticut, when he deposed her from their party’s leadership, when he kicked her out of the house and ordered her never to speak to him again…

Jesus twatting Christ. A therapist would have several field days with his behavior patterns. And with his and Nicola’s entire relationship over the past fifteen years. He wonders if she’ll suggest at any point that they get couples therapy. He wonders if he should say yes, despite his inevitable inclination to object.

Fuck it, he decides, he’ll absolutely go along with it if she brings it up. His full-throttle determination to purge Nicola Alison Murray from his life — with the exceptions of the bar of soap in the shower, the box of mementos under the bed, and what he’s preserved of his relationships with all four of her children — has flipped a complete one-eighty.  He’ll come down with another ulcer and die before he loses her again.

He wants her to know this. But he just as strongly wants her to know his days of making unilateral decisions are behind him.

“Of course I fucking want to stay.” Nicola says it like nothing has ever been more glaringly obvious, her words muffled by her mouth half-pressed against his suit coat, probably leaving a smear of her remaining lipstick behind even if it’s not easily visible on the dark fabric.

“Are you sure?”

He thinks it’s the right thing to say, but he’s miscalculated. She pulls back from him and takes his sense of calm with her, even though her arms remain around his waist.

“Malcolm, I know that if anyone has the right to doubt my judgment, it’s you, but coming back here was your idea.” She seeks out eye contact with him and holds it. “Do you really think I’d have agreed if I didn’t want to be here?”

He feels a little unworthy of the blazing look in her green irises. “I forced yeh out. Don’t wanna force yeh back. I didn’t  _ ask _ yeh to come home with me, I just blurted it—”

“You never need to ask.” She lets go of him, and he silently curses himself for it.

“Clearly you haven’t been this vulnerable in ages if you’re putting all your armor back up so quickly,” she says, stepping backward one pace, but thankfully only one. “And you must be quite the loner if I was literally the only person apart from your sister that Sam felt she could ring when you were in hospital.”

Malcolm does not like to get close to anyone for a long while after he’s been hurt. The first few days of 2007 come back to him unbidden: the frantic meetings and phone calls and  _ I’m away for a walk, _ trying to prevent his illustrious career from slipping through his fingers and engaging in a bridge-burning contest with Jamie in order to regain his grip. His fellow Caledonian Mafia don had likely been at the top of Sam’s emergency call list before the trust between the two men evaporated over the span of thirteen hours.

A scorched-earth, guns-blazing response to what he perceives as an attack on his primary anchor to reality is, it seems, Malcolm Tucker’s signature battle manoeuvre. But by some miracle Jamie forgave him, and by an even bigger miracle Nicola did too.

“I mean, Sam knows what I did to you, and she rang me anyway.”

Nicola’s words snap him out of his thoughts. Malcolm would rather talk about anything but why they broke up, but they have to do it sometime, and if they sort this out now, they’ll never have to speak of it again. Or so he hopes; he actually sends up a quick nonverbal prayer to a God he stopped believing in decades ago.

He doesn’t dive right into the conversation, though, and goes with, “Sam’s always been an optimist.”

“So have I.” Of course Nicola knows an attempted deflection when she hears it, and of course she bypasses it immediately. “I was always willing to put it behind us if you were. I knew you’d be livid, but I thought our relationship was stronger.”

“Yeah, well, so did I.” The words tumble out of Malcolm more quickly than he intended, and he instantly wishes he could redo them so they sound a bit less harsh, but it’s too late because Nicola looks on the verge of sobbing again, and her voice rises at least half an octave as she counters with, “Then how were we both so fucking wrong about us?”

The words hang in the air between them. Malcolm knows Nicola doesn’t have an answer to the question they both have been grappling with for three years, and he’s never come up with a decent one either. Perhaps it’s something they can only successfully tackle together.

“I thought I knew yeh,” he begins, because that’s where he always begins when he dares to think about their downfall. “Thought I had yeh figured out. Thought we’d been together long enough fer that.”

Nicola catches herself rolling her eyes. “Eight years isn’t that long, Malcolm. It definitely wasn’t long enough with you. I spent twenty-one years with James, but that was  _ too _ bloody long. You know that.”

“Exactly. Yeh weren’t happy with him.” Now they’re getting somewhere. “And I wasn’t nearly so happy with anyone else before yeh.”

Nicola’s eyebrows shoot up the way they do when she’s had an epiphany. “Did we get complacent, then? So confident we had our shit together as a couple that when it turned out we didn’t, we both just... spiraled?”

Malcolm nods, the sinking feeling in his stomach lessening. He hadn’t realised it was even there. “That sounds about fuckin’ right.”

Nicola looks like she could cry again, but out of relief this time. “Then we won’t do that again.”

He gives her another nod, a sharper one this time. She’s again left him temporarily unable to speak. He still can’t help but be so fucking proud of her every time she takes initiative, no matter the context.

Malcolm’s eyes drift over Nicola’s shoulder, back to that section of countertop that will always hold acute meaning for them. This entire kitchen has seen so much of their relationship: the two of them digging into a tub of ice cream together after they’d each had a tough day at work, him teaching her how to cook risotto and her refusing to give up until she mastered it, her insistence that he dance with her to some jazzy shite from the 70’s, countless kisses and touches, shared gasps and moans and so much more —

He wills the film reel in his head to slow to a halt before it overwhelms him. More reminiscing can wait.

Their last kiss in the house wasn’t here in the kitchen, thank fucking Christ. He’d returned from a business trip to find her sitting rigidly on the sofa, just seconds away from shattering his heart. She’d responded to his fervent “so good to be home” kiss as eagerly as she could, already aware that she might never receive another one.

They’ve been defined by one momentous kiss after another, and something has bothered Malcolm since the breakup, something he can’t leave unsaid, a connection he’s made between their first and last kisses. He needs to know if he’s mad or if there’s truth to it.

“I’ve been thinkin’,” he says, reclaiming eye contact, “about the first time yeh ever kissed me.”

Nicola tilts her head slightly. “Here, or the actual first time?”

“The actual first fucking time. The Party Conference. When we were both still married.”

He sees the memory of that night more than two decades ago, as distant and foggy as it is, cross her face rapidly. Karaoke, mojitos, slagging off Dan Miller, faulty hotel key cards and finally, their drunken collapses onto the floor outside her room and their moment of reckless snogging until his moral compass put an end to it.

Andrew fucking Watckins hadn’t been so prudent. Malcolm assumes the twat probably wasn’t capable of it, probably only thinks with his (undoubtedly inferior) cock. He doesn’t know if Andrew was married or in a relationship, but it doesn’t even matter, because everyone knew Nicola was with Malcolm.

His heart sinks. He didn't bring her disloyalty on himself, but he has considered to his vast displeasure that maybe he missed the warning signs.

“Did I remind you of James?”

Nicola’s jaw drops. "What? When?"

"Not at that conference,” Malcolm says hurriedly. “Before we split. I don't know and I don't fucking want to know any more details of how—" He inhales through his teeth, and it sounds too much like a hiss. "— _ unfulfilled _ you were with him and for how long, but if you already felt that way at the conference where we met, it makes too much fucking sense why you would stick yer tongue down my throat just because I was fucking  _ there _ and we were both wasted and got on well enough, and then years later when yeh felt like I was ignoring yeh, hadn't touched yeh enough lately, you would do the exact fucking same with that Andrew cunt. He just didn't have the balls to stop yeh."

His tone turns sour, of course, and Nicola winces. He doesn't like it. He doesn't want to rehash this much of the transgression that destroyed them, but it feels necessary in order to repair them, and if she thought otherwise, he knows she'd tell him so.

He watches her gather her thoughts before she speaks.

“I didn’t realize until afterward, largely thanks to a significant amount of therapy,” — this might be the least surprising thing Malcolm's heard all day — “that I did feel like history was repeating itself in some ways. And it did, like you already said. We’re too fucking good at that,” Nicola scoffs. “But it wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t take any responsibility for my colossal fuck-up.”

Malcolm is inclined to point out that he is not taking any fucking responsibility, thank you very much, but the last thing he wants is another row. Something else is more pressing, something he’s been both anticipating and dreading.

“Does he mean anything to you?” Malcolm’s voice takes on the same inflection it did when he bolted into her office and implored her to tell him where she found the photograph.

A familiar panic rises in Nicola’s face. “No, not at all. He never did.”

“Not at the time, but I meant something to you later.” Malcolm’s long-buried insecurities are on full display, but he can’t bring himself to give a shit. “What if he could, too?”

“He couldn’t,” she says with a conviction he’s rarely heard from her. “He won’t.”

“Yeh still see him ‘round work sometimes, don’t yeh?”

Nicola’s expression turns in the direction of anger, and Malcolm wishes he knew some other way of addressing this right now that didn’t put her on the spot.

She presses her lips together before she replies, “On a very rare occasion. But look, Malcolm, I can’t possibly care for him when he’ll always just remind me of how I fucking  _ wrecked _ the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He doesn’t say anything immediately, letting her words reverberate.

“And for the record,” Nicola continues. “I never regretted kissing you that year at Conference. Not once, not even when I still thought my marriage might be salvageable. I know you don’t have much of a reason to trust me about that, or about anything, really, but—”

“I believe yeh.”

She gives him an incredulous look, and he holds her gaze in an effort to convince her that he’s sincere, that he’s as tired of second-guessing her as he is of pretending not to love her.

It works. She visibly relaxes, though not completely. “So you thought you knew me, and then you thought you didn’t anymore?”

Malcolm is not above putting his foot down if this turns into a five-minute spiel of classic Nicola Murray Overanalysing, but for the most part he’s willing to let her rehash this point until she believes it’s resolved.

“Or maybe — this is more likely, actually,” she says, coming to a thankfully quick conclusion. “You thought you’d been deceiving yourself about me the entire time, because you were foolish enough to love me.”

Both theories ring true, but the latter rings truer. Malcolm sighs, more at himself than at her. “I was wrong. About all of that. And if yeh want t’call me a fool, you could say I was fer takin’ this long to give yeh another chance.”

Nicola shrugs. “Well, you had something of a point about that earlier on the bridge. It’s not the same, not precisely. You expect to be able to trust someone in a relationship. You shouldn’t expect that in government, especially when you’re the Opposition, but I did anyway, and that made  _ me _ the fool.”

Guilt stabs Malcolm yet again. “How did you forgive me, though? Was it just ‘cause I apologized and meant it?”

She stops and thinks again, remembering his apology all those years ago.

“It wasn’t just that.” She speaks deliberately, as if she’s still choosing her words while she’s saying them. “Without your job in the way, and therefore without your unhealthy attachment to it, you could actually treat me well. That was apparent when we were still just friends. Besides, I know I was a shit Leader. I know you had to do something about that or you would’ve been shit at your job, too. We’ve talked about this.”

“Yeah, and we’ve talked about how you already fancied me for whatever absurd fucking reason.” Malcolm has never really understood what Nicola saw in him back in those days, and he understands it even less now that how much of a bastard he’s been to her is becoming more obvious by the minute.

“It’s why yeh had to make sure I was alrigh’ after I got arrested,” he reminds himself out loud. “It’s why yeh stayed on this side of the pond after I practically begged yeh. It didn’t really matter why I even  _ wanted _ you to stay.”

“You’ve already told me why.” Nicola remembers it before he does. “You told me why the same day it happened. It wasn’t just about political Jenga. You said I was a breath of fresh air, a glass of water in a desert where vultures were picking you apart.”

It feels more recent than fourteen years ago. She’d been swigging merlot and sulking at her desk after he’d talked her into ditching the Yale job offer and talked Tom Davis into calling the election. She’d confessed that a job overseas had been her best and only option to discreetly leave James, and he’d confessed he liked having her around.

He’d proceeded to lock away the remorse about accidentally prolonging her miserable marriage and swallow the key. Nicola is currently unaware that she’s found the key and put it to use, but it turns out she is aware that he wasn’t as honest that night in her DoSAC office as he thought he was.

“Unless there was more to it than that.” She gives him a look that indicates she’s been holding onto this idea for a while, and Malcolm feels apprehension set in. What does she know that he doesn’t?

“Unless you already fancied me, too.”

Oh. That.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (This was going to be a three-shot until chapter 2 got wayyy too long and I found a place to split it with a cliffhanger. Hopefully it worked. And at least chapter 3 is already almost done.)


	3. everything i've loved, everything i've lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing feels trivial to him at this moment, not when he’s faced with the damage he’s done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I am not trying to make the emotional baggage too reminiscent of "the persistence of memory" (a masterpiece) by @dickovny, but our favorite grouchy ex-spin doctor has a lot to answer for, more so than Nicola does. Tricki knew this when they wrote their fic, complete with the sentence "Malcolm deserves to see the damage" in chapter 7, so I took that and ran with it. Plus I just really enjoy fishing in Malcolm's angsty little head and seeing what bites.
> 
> Adding a chapter to this fic meant rearranging chapter titles/songs. So yeah, I know Coming Back to Me by The Naked and Famous was originally the song for chapter 1. Now it's here. Chapter 1 has something more fitting now.

He told himself the same story about her for years.

Malcolm once believed with immense conviction that he didn’t feel anything romantic for Nicola until after he had served his gaol sentence, she had gotten a divorce and they had carefully developed a friendship. Once they had built a life together, little flashes of recollection from their government careers’ brief overlap gave him the impression that he might have been mistaken. He might possibly have felt something for her when she came so close to moving to America. And when she cried in his office after Ella’s near-expulsion from school. And when she told him in no uncertain terms to leave that hotel room in Eastbourne.

He used to chalk up his dreadful behavior toward the former Leader of the Opposition to how grueling those two years were, how utterly powerless their party was and how Nicola hadn’t achieved an iota of progress in that arena despite all her struggling, flailing and fucking  _ trying. _ Such was his pretext for publicly humiliating her and, in the process, quashing what was left of his conscience after nine years as the party’s ruthless media master.

They had been partners nearly that long when she betrayed him and he hung her out to dry.

It wasn’t just memories of their relationship, though the box under the bed was limited to just those, that haunted Malcolm afterward. DoSAC, Eastbourne, mojitos, the dress he said gave him fucking tinnitus — his pre-relationship and even pre-Opposition memories of Nicola hurt almost as badly in the early days, weeks and months of their breakup. The sheer  _ depth _ of the loss he felt took him aback. The end of his marriage to Lucille hadn’t at all been so painful, even though it had been a slow decay rather than a detonation and even though he’d been with her longer.

Nicola was special to Malcolm from the start, and during their separation he claimed to hate her all the more for it. He considers that he could have been projecting, that it was really self-loathing for still being so good at lying to himself, so fucking adept at spin.

Which is why as much as he wants to be truthful with both himself and her right now, he still feels a bit out of his element. Nicola had, of course, called him out when she said he hadn’t been this vulnerable in ages. She can read him like no one else can, like no one else ever has, not even his mother and sister.

When they became friends after his release from gaol, when they were still tiptoeing around their feelings for each other, Malcolm realised quickly that he neither wanted to nor had to  _ perform _ around Nicola anymore, didn’t feel the need to hold himself back or to crank himself up to eleven. He was accustomed to always putting on some kind of show, whether in his political career, his new PR job or his erstwhile marriage. He remembers feeling an odd sense of relief about Nicola bringing out his authentic self, grouchy and profanity-laden but ultimately decent and good-humored at his core, and for a time he was even used to it.

He put on a hell of a fucking show when he ended things, and he did it again in that hospital room, reverting to Opposition-level rancor only to promptly soar past it. He’d meant to stay there until their confrontation on the bridge had led him to chuck his metaphorical Shakespearean tragedy mask into the Thames.

After all that, he owes Nicola the truth, at the absolute  _ least. _

“I felt something.” He wants to sound firmer, but his voicebox doesn’t fucking deliver. Or maybe it does. Maybe Malcolm Tucker is simply reaching a new level of vulnerability. Wonders never cease, or at least they don’t when Nicola’s around. “I think I did fancy you. Maybe even back in the DoSAC days.”

Her mouth starts but doesn’t finish morphing into that proud smirk it always gets when he admits something to her that he once would have ardently denied.

“Because you’re fucking doomed to me.” It’s her turn to repeat his words from the bridge, and he doesn’t have a reply that isn’t total agreement. She knows this, still half-smirking, and he feels his own expression match it.

“Well, I’m just as fucking doomed to you, if that wasn’t abundantly clear,” she says with the slightest air of smugness. She isn’t calm yet, though, with the lines on her forehead still creased and her shoulders still raised with tension, and Malcolm infers he hasn’t reassured her thoroughly enough that he’s willing to move forward with her.

He raises a fresh point, one that he used to find amusing. “Y’know how yeh always managed to surprise me when we were both in government?”

Nicola’s heard a version of this before, but she asks anyway, “What’s that?”

“Yeh never fucked up the same way twice. Somehow, some way, you found  _ completely new  _ ways to fuck up every time.” Malcolm is still slightly amused by this but knows better than to show it. “Yer talent was un-fucking-paralleled.”

She continues to fight a burgeoning smile. “Is that why you never called anyone else an omnishambles? Because I was the only one who fit your definition of that mad, made-up word?”

“Aye. So I’m not gonna worry about you cheatin’ again. I know yeh won’t.” Malcolm waits a beat so Nicola can absorb this declaration before he turns his well-worn justification for leaving her on its head and hopes the words come out right. “I was so fucking embroiled in how hurt I was that I did everything in my power to make you as sorry as fuckin’ possible, as if yeh weren’t already torn up before yeh even told me about it. I never had to  _ make _ yeh sorry. I did anyway.”

Her face falls, and Malcolm wonders where he missed the mark.

“One of the things I told myself to try to make it hurt less,” Nicola says with even more deliberation than a few minutes ago, “was that your reaction was a given because I blindsided you. It’s different when you suspect infidelity.” Malcolm notes that her voice has never lost that slight edge of bitterness whenever she references James’ affair, as much as she no longer cares for the man himself. “At least when that’s confirmed, you still get the twisted satisfaction of saying, ‘Oh, I fucking knew it.’ You didn’t even have that. You, the all-seeing, all-swearing eye. It must have been a blow to your pride on top of the heart-wrenching betrayal.”

She’s right again. He’d been blissfully ignorant for two months before she dropped the bomb, and he hadn’t considered that as a factor in his knee-jerk reaction of quitting her cold turkey. He puts the processing of that revelation on hold as she keeps talking, her words snowballing along with her thoughts.

“And Christ, Malcolm, when you came home that night and I told you something was wrong, you were so concerned. I knew you would be, but it still punched me in the gut. If someone had hurt me, you would have hunted them down and fucking disemboweled them, and if I’d been struggling with something, like — like a particularly awful bout of anxiety, you would have taken care of me as best you could.” The pace of her words increases the more she speaks, and tears return to her eyes.

The last thing Malcolm had been aiming for was to send her down an emotional rabbit hole, and before he can chastise himself for _fucking things up again, yeh massive twat_ , he finds himself reaching for her. He doesn’t wrap her in his arms again because that’s not what she needs right now. Instead, he puts his hands on her shoulders, which have hunched over like she's hoping to withdraw into herself. Slowly but firmly, he nudges her into a more upright posture and watches her draw the strength to keep going, to get this nightmare of a memory out of her system once and for all.

“And there I was, staring at all of that in those big, stormy blue eyes of yours and feeling sick because it was too fucking late to turn back even though there was a very strong chance I was about to lose you.” She sniffles. “Because if anyone can take such a good thing and ruin it so spectacularly,” she says as she gestures at herself with both hands, “it’s Nicola fucking Murray. The most useless, incompetent waste of skin in all of Westminster. The human version of the fucked-up coffee machine from DoSAC. You gave me your heart and your house and your family and I just — I just proved you extremely, painfully right.”

The look on her face turns from tormented to almost sheepish, as if she hadn’t meant to unpack so much baggage at once. She looks up at Malcolm with all the remorse she gave him the night he left her, and he draws her in for another embrace, more forcefully than he’d like but determined to make up for pushing her away last time he saw that look.

She must sense this, he thinks, as she shudders against him with one more sob and a plaintive “Malcolm.”

“Hush.” He’s not sure where the word came from because he can’t recall ever saying it to her before, but it feels appropriate. “Darlin’, just fucking hush. We won’t speak of it again, alrigh’?” He takes her by the shoulders again, more gently this time, then lifts a hand to cradle her jaw. “Not like it never happened, but like we’re moving the fuck on.”

She gives him a small but resolute nod of affirmation. His thumb caresses the corner of her mouth.

“I love you.” Malcolm has always been less likely to say it first. Maybe he should even that out in the future.

“I love you, too.” Nicola resumes leaning against him, finally relaxed.

She’s probably told her therapist everything she just told him, but Malcolm doubts she was able to achieve closure without saying it to him directly. As silence sets in and the steady pace of her breathing becomes his as well, it dawns on him that he might have needed to hear it just as much as she needed to say it.

A thought crosses his mind for the first time and chills him to the bone. He was never inclined, in his government days, to assess the destruction in his wake after any of the ground-shaking bollockings, forced resignations, or myriad threats he made to ministers, backbenchers, advisers and journalists alike. He was always too busy rushing from one fiasco to the next, and an active conscience wasn’t a Director of Communications job requirement — it was actually a detriment.

He assumed he’d done his penance regarding how he treated Nicola when she was Leader, from his gaol sentence after the inquiry she called for at his urging, to accepting all her idiosyncrasies and even learning to love them, to finding new ways to surprise her on her birthday every year, to becoming her kids’ third parent. He thought any harm he’d done to her during their handful of mutual years in government was solidly a thing of the past.

But if that were true, she wouldn’t have quoted one of the first insults he ever chucked at her, way back when she’d just been elevated to Cabinet. And he had, in fact, rebuilt and fortified the wall of verbal venom between them the second she told him what she’d done — it was the only way he could conceivably try to force himself out of love with her — and he’d kept that wall up for three years until that photograph and the words she wrote on the back knocked it right the fuck down.

He used to excuse his words and his tirades with the facts that she had indeed developed thicker skin and that she wasn’t a total pushover to begin with. She was the only minister who consistently stood up to him, and he even became proud of her for it after he was no longer responsible for keeping ministers in line.

(He also found her stubbornness and her willingness to shout back at him quite arousing, which later would prove to be sometimes an asset and other times a liability.)

Even after several years together, he never quite broke the habit of occasionally snapping at her like he did in Whitehall, and she would fire back just the same way. Such antagonism wasn’t the cornerstone of their relationship, but it was ingrained in the foundation — one that hadn’t held them up the way a foundation should.

Malcolm is genuinely afraid he’ll just keel over onto the kitchen floor, and possibly take Nicola down with him, if he doesn’t fix this  _ now. _

“I’m sorry.”

She cranes her neck to look up at him. “What for?”

“For everything I said at the hospital. And the night I left. And right after yer resignation, in yer office, or Dan Miller’s or whoever the fuck’s office it was.” He could go on, but the list is too fucking long and there’s no way he remembers everything anyway. He does remember one more thing, though, a specific effort to kick her while she was down. “And those fucking flowers I sent you the day I backstabbed yeh.”

She lets out a chuckle, and Malcolm doesn’t know if it’s because flowers seem so trivial in the grand scheme of things, even if they came with a nasty note, or if she’s just thinking about how ridiculous he was to do that in the first place.

He’s suddenly annoyed because as ridiculous as he very much was, nothing feels trivial to him at this moment, not when he’s faced with the damage he’s done to someone who believes, staunchly, that he never has to ask her to come home with him.

“I don’t get how yeh stand me sometimes, Nic’la.” He truly doesn’t. “I’m fucking toxic. No one knows that better than you.”

It’s this knowledge, he guesses, that has her much less concerned about this than he is. “We’re both living, breathing disasters, Malcolm,” she says. “You’re the only one who really knows just how much of a fucking mess I am.”

He half-shrugs one shoulder, trying not to dislodge her grip on him. “Doesn’t mean I have to hurt you for it.”

“You hurt yourself, too,” she reminds him. “And I broke my own heart when I broke yours. How many times did we say I was your other half, or vice versa?”

“We said it ‘cause it’s true. Still is.” Malcolm has never made this much of an effort to know his own heart, but he knows Nicola, and maybe that’s the same thing.

“I mean it. I’m sorry for all the fucking times I didn’t care if I hurt yeh. And the times I did.” Jesus, what a fucking track record he has with her. “I could say yeh didn’t deserve it, but fuck deserving, ‘cause after all the shite I’ve put yeh through, I don’t deserve you.”

“And yet I still came home with you.” Nicola reaches for the back of his neck and pulls him down so their foreheads touch. “You’re right. Fuck deserving. We shouldn’t bother anymore with whether or not we deserve each other. It should be enough that we love each other and want to be with each other, right?”

Malcolm barely has time to exhale a “yes” before they succumb to the magnetic field between their lips. He did not know forgiveness could have a taste, but it does, and it tastes like the woman he loves in all her omnishambolic glory. He responds to the increased pressure on the back of his neck by pulling her up onto her toes, into the good old happy medium of their height difference.

He expects them to stay there for about thirty more seconds, but Nicola breaks the kiss frustratingly soon, sinking back down onto flat feet with a little “oh,” the telltale sign she’s decided mid-snog that she’s actually not done talking.

“I’m sorry I slapped you.” Her sincerity would make Malcolm laugh if he weren’t short of breath.

“Don’t be,” he says just as earnestly. “That was a decade and a fuckin’ half in the making.”

“It most certainly was!” Nicola’s tone reverts effortlessly to the fond chiding they both know so well, healing Malcolm’s heart further. “Although deep down, you probably enjoyed it, you sodding masochist. I might do it again sometime.”

He’s not sure if it’s the teasing or the levity or the spot-on assessment of, yes, his masochistic tendencies (that are immensely enjoyable for both of them in the right context), but perhaps all three bring him to murmur a long-awaited “That’s my girl.”

Another tear falls, and Malcolm moves to wipe it from Nicola’s cheek, but she beats him to it.

“I’m your fucking girl,” she says, voice wavering as if the concept overwhelms her.

“You fucking are.” Malcolm kisses her again, concentrating on the softness of her lips and the enthusiasm of her response, unwittingly reviving something in the recesses of his mind. Not wanting to risk forgetting it entirely, he reluctantly retreats enough to say, “One more thing, pet.”

“This better be important, Malcolm,” Nicola whines, implying that he’ll keep it  _ very _ concise if he knows what’s good for him.

He does his best. “Did you kiss me at the hospital?”

Her eyes widen. “I did. You were out cold. At least I thought you were, with all those drugs they had you on—”

“I was. Or I must’ve been. It’s not a memory,” he clarifies. “Just a feeling.”

She looks away from him and covers her mouth with one hand, and Malcolm realises she’s trying not to laugh.

“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” His voice takes on that casually affronted tone he missed using with her.

Nicola gathers herself. “I just didn’t think I’d ever have another opportunity to kiss you. Famous last fucking words.”

Malcolm has to stifle his own laughter before he leans in, his voice dropping close to a whisper. “But y’know much I like provin’ yeh wrong, Nic’la.”

And she smiles, really smiles, at him for the first time in more than three years, and he’s briefly torn between basking in it and kissing her senseless. He opts for the latter not just because he has a point to make, but also because he knows he has  _ time _ to see her smile like that, over and over again.

Their tongues explore familiar territory as their eagerness builds into impatience, the first domino finally tipping when Malcolm’s hand finds Nicola’s arse and squeezes it. She whimpers against his lips, and he grins wickedly against hers.

_ Now _ they’re home.

Before he can suggest they take this upstairs, or to the sofa, whichever she prefers, Nicola closes a hand around his tie and drags him forward as she shuffles backward until she’s willingly trapped between him and that sacred section of granite countertop. He hums his approval and slides a hand down to the hem of her skirt, but before he can slip underneath it, she removes her hands from his body and places them on the edge of the counter behind her. She breaks the kiss for a few seconds, hoists herself up onto the counter with an endearing little grunt and takes his face in her hands to bring it back to hers.

His own hands resume what one had started. To his delight he finds that Nicola is in fact wearing stockings, and now he’s the one gleefully stuck in place as those muscular calves of hers press against the backs of his thighs. Her hands travel to his shoulders and push at his coat until he removes it, tossing it carelessly to the floor, and she’s about to set to work on the buttons of his shirt when he turns his attention to hers. The brush of his fingertips against the bare skin of her chest makes her tremble and gasp, a sensory medley that hits Malcolm almost hard enough to make him lightheaded.

Luckily, he only needs to undo one button in order to expose those beloved freckles, and when he drops his mouth to them hungrily, Nicola rakes her fingers through his thick curls and digs her nails into his scalp. They moan in unison.

The distant sound of the front door opening and closing escapes their notice completely.

A voice raises an alarm in Malcolm’s subconscious, a voice that isn’t Nicola’s, but his focus on her doesn’t falter until her body tenses and she mutters “fuck” too frantically for either to be a response to anything he’s doing.

The voice gets closer, and Malcolm finally emerges from the heat of the moment when he hears his name — no, his nickname, in a worried call of “Are you here, Malc?”

Footsteps approach too quickly for him and Nicola to right themselves. He’s still wrist-deep in her skirt and she’s still on the counter when those footsteps round the corner.

“I just wanted to check on — holy fucking shit.”

The figure in the entryway spins around instantly, still swearing. Malcolm utters his own string of expletives and takes Nicola’s hand in his, helping her to the floor.

Time freezes for the three of them until one dares to speak, still not looking, still in shock, nervous laughter bubbling up.

“What in the actual fuck is going on here, Mum?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And they finally kissed! And someone finally finds out! And y'all finally get what you came for! Big thanks for all the lovely comments that provided 90% of my motivation to tackle the psychological beast of these past two chapters.
> 
> Also, I just had to include a direct reference to Coffeeverse chapter 2 (which I plan to revisit later in the series), in which Leader of the Opposition Nicola Murray tells her snarky media adviser that she's "not your fucking girl." Famous last words indeed, darling.


	4. if ever your fortress caves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Other people’s mistakes are for us to learn from, not to carry around with us until we’re crushed under the weight of them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this fic is going to be five chapters now. Raise your hand if you're surprised. Nobody? Yeah, I thought so.
> 
> Chapter title from Fortress by Queens of the Stone Age (one of my favorite songs of all time).

_ “So that’s it? You just don’t love her anymore?” _

_ Ella’s seething, teeth bared, glaring at him in the kitchen that as of last night just his now. Nicola is currently staying at Katie and her husband’s flat while she looks for a new place to live. Malcolm knows he’ll get a thorough bollocking from Katie once her mother’s back on her feet, and the only silver lining he can see in Ella’s current state is that Katie hopefully can’t be worse. _

_ It’s not just what Ella’s saying; it’s how hurt she is. He can’t look directly at her. He should, it’s only respectful, but he can’t. Staring down the barrel of consequences has never been Malcolm’s forte. _

_ “It’s not that simple, Ells.” _

_ “Don’t fucking call me that right now!” _

_ He involuntarily recalls the first time he saw Nicola cry, how she grew just enough of a spine to yell  _ don’t ever fucking call me Nicky, _ and the memory cuts him. Until just yesterday, Malcolm loved when her children were so unmistakably hers. After all this time, he even thinks of them as his. _

_ (Nicola is his no longer. She ceased to be his when she fucked someone else. Malcolm will beat that justification to death if he must.) _

_ He did not stop to consider where his decision to end things would leave the kids. They’re not even kids anymore, for Christ’s sake. Josh might as well be grown like the rest of them even though he’s still seventeen. _

_ But Ella’s the only one of the four who’s talking to Malcolm right now, and instead of talking she’s shouting herself hoarse. She’s always reminded him of himself, and he’s trying his damnedest not to think that she sounds like he did during the diatribe he launched at Nicola after her confession last night. _

_ All he can say is “I still love you, Ella,” not a bit certain it will calm her down. _

_ It doesn’t. She scoffs, almost  _ laughs. _ “Is that so?” _

_ “Of course it—” _

_ “Of course nothing! Nothing was ever guaranteed to last with you, was it?” Ella’s gesticulating as she shouts, another similarity to him. He’s never seen her like this. “You broke Mum’s heart all over again! Just like Katie spent the first two years afraid you would!” _

_ Fuck. Just… fuck. Maybe the inevitable confrontation with Katie  _ will _ be worse. Just as bad, at least. _

_ “So if you have any sense at all, which I seriously fucking doubt, you’ll forgive me for not taking you seriously when you say you still love me or any of my siblings. I mean, how long is that gonna last, huh?” Ella says it like she’s challenging him to  _ think, _ and there she is reminding him of her mother again. “How can we know you won’t just drop us, too?” _

_ She goes right for the jugular, just like he would, and anger surges in Malcolm’s chest against his will, as if he has the right to question why she would doubt him. _

_ “Ella Cecilia—” _

_ “How can we know?” _

_ He can’t avoid looking at her when her voice catches like that, and his own voice stops working. Irony is a cruel bitch. He dumped Nicola because he could no longer trust her. Now the kids can’t trust him, or at least this one can’t, and that would torture him even if he was still with her mother. _

_ Ella misinterprets his silence. “That’s what I thought.” _

_ She turns and runs out of the house. He calls after her, but the sound of her receding footsteps tells him she doesn’t even pause, and she slams the door just like he did last night when he left. _

_ Fucking hell. He’s convinced himself he can live with never seeing Nicola again, but he’s not sure how he’ll cope if her strong-willed firebrand of a daughter decides he’s no longer worth her time. After everything she screamed at him, he’s not even sure he can blame Ella if she does. And what if her siblings follow her lead? She’d been the first kid to welcome him into the Murray family, after all. _

_ He can’t undo what he’s done, just like Nicola can’t undo what she did to him. They made their choices, and now they and everyone close to them will have to live with the results. _

_ Christ, it’s been years since Malcolm has made such an effort to tamp down his conscience, but he refuses to dissect this in case it adds to his pain. _

* * *

Ella doesn’t dare turn around yet. She listens, but not too closely: two voices murmur and curse (she thinks she hears the name  _ Thatcher, _ though she can’t fathom why) and hands run hurriedly across fabric. Once the sounds dissipate, she gives herself permission to say something.

“Should I turn around yet, or are you going to psychologically damage me further?”

As she expected, Malcolm speaks first. “Fuckin’ Christ, lass, did yeh think to maybe give us a ring before bargin’ in?”

“I did!” She whirls around, eyes flaring with indignation, her phone almost hitting the wall as it swings inside her coat pocket. “You didn’t answer your mobile and I was worried, so I called Sarah, and she said you left the office in a rush without taking any work shit with you, and that’s not like you at all, so here I am! Thank God I caught the tube as quickly as I did or I would’ve shown up here later and—” Ella shudders. She does not want to think about, much less communicate, what she could have walked in instead of what she did.

She dares to observe them. Nicola has straightened her skirt and redone her top button, and a dark pink smudge at one corner of her mouth is the only evidence she had been wearing any lipstick at all. Malcolm has corrected his tie, but his suit coat is still in a heap on the floor behind him, and Ella’s sure he would have retrieved it by now if he gave a shit, or maybe he’s forgotten it’s even there. It’s been months since his last haircut — Ella has the schedule memorised after eleven years in his life — so the particularly unkempt mess of curls on his head serves as another reminder of what she just stumbled across.

(She will never forget Malcolm’s decision within two weeks of his and Nicola’s separation to get his hair cut so short he nearly resembled a shorn, cantankerous sheep. A nagging memory had led Ella to a quick Google Images search that revealed he’d looked like that during the Goolding Inquiry and when he’d been arrested. She concluded he probably looked the same a few months earlier when he broke her mother’s heart the first time, and she almost burst into tears remembering Nicola’s affinity for running her hands through his curls.)

Based on her call with Malcolm’s assistant, Ella figures he and Nicola can’t have been here very long. She begrudgingly accepted years ago that they might never reunite or even come close to forgiveness, but she could definitely be more surprised that they seem to have resuscitated their relationship as abruptly as they killed it.

Christ, they’re both such trainwrecks sometimes.

Malcolm brings her back to reality. “Yeh don’t have to get so fuckin’ worried every time I don’t pick up the phone, Ells.”

She shrugs flippantly. “I think I do, actually. Force of habit.”

“You should know we’re only going to get worse about it from here on out,” Nicola says to Malcolm, the fondness in her voice impossible not to notice, along with the implication that she’s fully back in his life.

Ella is still processing this, so as usual she defaults to snark. “Right, we should absolutely  _ both _ check on him. I’d  _ love _ to relive this someday, but maybe with a bit worse timing.”

Malcolm throws a sideways glance and a cheeky smile at Nicola, who returns both as Ella rolls her eyes.

“You two have no shame — and no hard feelings anymore, from the looks of it.” Experience has taught Ella that assumptions rarely turn out well, especially with these two. She needs them to explicitly confirm what the last few minutes have led her to believe.

“This better be fucking real, because I will be  _ furious _ if you got my hopes up when you’re actually just going for one last better-late-than-never shag to get it out of your systems after the whole hospital thing.” Both Malcolm and Nicola open their mouths to respond, but Ella ignores this and forges ahead. “Or if this is all some massive, caffeine-induced hallucination.”

One hand gestures aimlessly as she speaks, and Ella could swear Malcolm looks proud to see it.

“You might wanna lay off the coffee, pet,” he counters.

“I will if you will.”

The concept is completely nonsensical to them both, of course, so Malcolm engages in a vigorous eyebrow-raising contest with his younger almost-stepdaughter for several seconds before Ella scoffs, “You’re fucking ridiculous.”

Nicola had been trying to restrain her laughter but gives up completely, and Malcolm instinctively wraps an arm around her shoulders. She leans against him and keeps laughing with an effervescence specific to the man she loves, and he looks down at her in barely-concealed awestruck devotion, as if he never stopped.

It’s more than enough evidence for Ella. “Okay, fine, y’know what? Based on that, there’s no way this isn’t real.”

She doesn’t need a verbal response. Nicola sighs contentedly, and Malcolm gives Ella a genuine smile and a meaningful nod.

As much as she knows it will make Malcolm wince (and it does), Ella can’t hold back a high-pitched squeal of joy. Nicola steps aside, making way for her daughter to fling herself at Malcolm in a crushing hug that he reciprocates as soon as he’s certain the impact won’t send them toppling to the floor.

It feels like a reunion to Ella, even though it isn’t, because she and Malcolm have seen each other regularly for three years, but she always felt a bit like she was talking to a ghost, a shell of the man who practically adopted her more than a decade ago. This is the real Malcolm, all dimples and casual affection and talking shit, actually smiling  _ effortlessly _ for the first time Ella has seen since before the breakup, mirth finally reaching his eyes and making them sparkle again, just like old times.

Old times no longer. This is Ella’s third parent. God, she missed him.

“Mind if I join?” Nicola already has an arm around each of them but still insists on being polite.

“We’d mind if you didn’t.” Ella can hear the teasing grin in Malcolm’s voice without looking up at him. They return the gesture, and Ella thinks Malcolm must be quite happy to have two of his girls in his arms again.

(Katie will be harder to sway, just like she was last time, but Ella has faith in both her sister and Malcolm, and her mum unquestionably does too.)

Nicola’s thoughts aren’t far from Ella’s. “This is the last thing you expected today, isn’t it?”

“Which of us are you talking to?” Ella asks, not that the answer really matters.

Nicola takes a second to think before she says, “I don’t know. Possibly myself.”

Malcolm holds Nicola and Ella a little more tightly, their heads against his chest, as all three of their bodies shake with laughter.

This close, Ella can see a mark forming on her mum’s collarbone near the darker freckle. No shame, indeed. It’s not the first time she’s seen such a thing, too. But as much as intimacy between Nicola and her mad Scot (or anyone, really) makes Ella cringe, at this point it’s something of a relief. A sign of normalcy and happiness and as close to true peace as this family ever comes, especially after it seemed permanently out of reach for a handful of years.

She’d truly considered the option of never speaking to Malcolm again after he left Nicola, but no catastrophe could erase his eight years as a father figure to her and her siblings. Not after he taught her and her brothers how to drive, held back tears at her and Katie’s university graduations, and tried but failed to stop himself from crying at Katie’s wedding. He bollocked more than one uncooperative member of a group project for potentially fucking up Ben or Josh’s grades when they were in secondary school (even if Ben or Josh had been just as uncooperative). Ella once mentioned in passing that she’d wanted to play the drums until her father said it wasn’t something women do, and Malcolm had proceeded to get her a drum set and soundproof the attic the following Christmas.

He was the dad she'd always fucking needed, so she chose to stay in his life even though he chose to stay out of Nicola’s. Ella came to understand that as much as she wanted to punish Malcolm, it wasn’t her place to do so, and he was apparently punishing himself anyway. He could pretend to be over Nicola as much as he pleased, but he wasn’t, and he likely never would be.

Besides, Ella knew that just as she’d unintentionally led the way for all three of her siblings to accept Malcolm into the family, she would have to stay at least somewhat in touch with him or he’d lose all four of them in addition to their mother. He didn’t ask for that when he ended things with Nicola, even though he didn’t anticipate the ripple effect his decision would have on their family.

(Then again, Nicola hadn’t been thinking before she acted, either. All four of her children harbored varying levels of anger toward her as well as Malcolm for at least a short while after the split.)

So with Ella’s approval, Malcolm tried sincerely for three years to maintain his relationships with his ex’s offspring. He and Ella would meet once a week at either her flat or his house for tea or dinner, depending on both their moods, and regular text messages provided the rest of their interaction. At times, including the few weeks just before Malcolm collapsed in his office, Ella’s messages would go unanswered and she would, in spite of herself, worry that he was done with her like he was allegedly done with Nicola. Her fear was proven wrong each time, and yet she could never shake it.

He’s on his fourth PA since the breakup, and Ella knows she used to annoy the first three with her persistent calls to Malcolm’s office until he acknowledged her, but Sarah’s been refreshingly understanding in the six months she’s worked for him. She might be a keeper.

Ella has never met anyone more stubborn than the other two-thirds of their group hug (unless she includes herself), so she always thought she’d be wasting her time hoping they would get back together. Nicola’s reaction to Malcolm’s health scare didn’t change this, but Ella thought she seemed a little more like her pre-breakup self afterward. In hindsight, it was a sign.

“So it only took a serious stint in hospital for you to admit you weren’t ever gonna move on,” Ella says as they all let go of each other.

Nicola rolls her eyes in mock exasperation. “I admitted that at least a year ago.”

“I know. I just meant him.”

Malcolm completely misses Nicola’s responding guffaw as he volleys back at Ella and her mischievous grin. “Didya come here to check on me or just to call me out?”

“Both, actually. Worthy fucking causes. Sarah might agree. I know she’ll never be Sam, but she’s obviously damn patient with you.”

“Sarah’s your PA?” Nicola interjects.

Ella nods. “Right, you wouldn’t even know.  She and I have talked enough that we might actually be friends now. I’m not sure why she's fetching you—” she returns her attention to Malcolm “—satsumas and skinny muffins when she's got a fucking Ph.D. in comms."

Nicola raises her eyebrows at Malcolm in a way that indicates Ella’s point is valid. He shoots them a look that indicates he could do without them ganging up on him right now.

“God, I hope you pay this poor girl decently,” Nicola only half-teases.

“Of course I fucking do.” Malcolm looks quite annoyed that anyone would suggest otherwise. “And she’s got her foot in the door at a fuckin’ prestigious firm—”

“You should give her a bonus for finding the photograph. I don’t know her yet, but I like her already.”

“Don’t get her talkin’ about snakes, then. She’s got a pet one.”

Nicola visibly shudders.

“Or cilantro,” Ella quips. “She likes it a lot.”

Malcolm and Nicola simultaneously aim curious looks in Ella’s direction. The younger woman shrugs. “What? I said she’s my friend.”

Ella can almost see the words forming in her mother’s head — the opinion no one asked for because they already know it, that she thinks cilantro tastes like soap, or at best dirt with a hint of citrus — but Nicola decides at the last second that she would rather resume bickering with her partner after missing out on it for three years. “She might deserve a bonus anyway just for putting up with you on a daily basis.”

Malcolm’s barbed reply doesn’t register with Ella, who digs out her phone, dashes off a rather urgent text message, and laughs out loud only thirty seconds later. The sudden silence tells her she’s caught Malcolm and Nicola’s attention and should probably explain herself.

“Josh owes me twenty-five quid,” she says, holding up her phone before putting it back in her coat pocket. “He just literally bet that I’m lying about you two getting back together. Chloé’s more optimistic, but she would be since she just saw you—”

“Wait a fucking minute,” Malcolm cuts her off. “Who all did you just—”

“Relax, Malc, it’s just the old group chat with the four of us and Chloé. She’s the one who’s kept it alive for the past three years, so really, this is her fault.” Ella puts on her most innocent smile, the one that always disarms Malcolm.

He shakes his head. “Christ alive, Ella Cecilia.”

Nicola takes the opportunity to be the adult in the room, or at least to try, considering the position’s been vacant since Ella showed up. “Was that really necessary, though?”

Ella was ready for that question. “Look, you know I can’t keep secrets I don’t  _ want _ to keep, and haven’t we all suffered long enough? Besides, when he was in hospital, none of us heard about it from you.” She senses the incoming objections from them both and stamps them out in advance. “Again, it’s Chloé’s fault. She brought it up in the group chat assuming we knew. I did, though. Sarah told me.” 

Malcolm, thankfully, does not appear to be upset with Nicola, and his skill at defusing squabbles between her and Ella really could have come in handy sooner than eleven years ago.

“Yeh sure blaming yer cousin is the answer to everything?” He’s not quite serious but not quite joking either. Ella can concede that point. Nicola and all four of her children had kept in touch with Malcolm’s niece, but Chloé did most of the heavy lifting.

“It’s fine, really. We just didn’t know that you knew before we did.” Ella tilts her head at Nicola, who sighs.

“There was a lot going on, alright?”

Ella smirks. “Yeah, that’s pretty clear now.”

“So what’d you tell them exactly?” Malcolm’s arm finds its way around Nicola’s shoulders again.

The smirk widens. “I said Grumpy Cat and the Duchess worked things out.”

Nicola giggles and Malcolm puts his head in his free hand.

Some years ago, the Murray kids and their Scottish step-cousin decided Malcolm was the human version of the Grumpy Cat meme, and if he had to be a fictional feline, so did Nicola, whom they assigned the Duchess from the Disney film  _ Aristocats. _ This naturally led to several arguments among the younger generation as to who was which kitten, especially since there were only three in the movie. They could all agree that Katie was Marie and Ben was Berlioz, leaving Ella and Josh to lead the group’s debate over which of them was the third kitten or the mouse (Chloé declared herself one of the jazz-playing alley cats, and no one argued otherwise).

“Yer officially Roquefort now, y’know that?”

Ella had almost forgotten how familiar Malcolm was with the ongoing debate, but she picks up on his meaning immediately. “He’s a mouse, not a rat. Jesus, if you’re gonna go there, you should get it right.”

“Doesn’t fucking matter. Yeh realise Wendy will never, ever let me live it the fuck down that she heard about this from Chloé instead of me?”

“Yeah, well, what are annoying little sisters for?” One of the earliest Murray-Tucker-McNair family holidays in Scotland had resulted in Ella forming an alliance with Aunt Wendy to gang up on their older siblings whenever they got the chance. Katie and Malcolm were not thrilled. Everyone else was thoroughly entertained, even Malcolm and Wendy’s mother at times.

Malcolm preemptively answers the question on Nicola’s face when she looks up at him. “Before yeh ask, I spent most of the past two weeks bored off my arse.”

“That is no way to talk about your family.” Nicola pokes him in the chest, smiling despite her words.

“It’s not their fault, Nic’la, y’know how I feel about a forced holiday.”

“I get it. I just miss them, I haven’t seen them in ages.”

“We can fix that.”

“Oh, we will. Chloé’s already agreed to come down here once Parliament rises and she’s finished exams—”

Their conversation turns to their shared gratitude that they won’t have to split their niece’s visit into a sort of custody arrangement like they’ve done for three years with the kids, but Ella doesn’t hear it. Reaching back into her pocket for her phone reveals a thin line of ink on the outside of her left forearm when her sleeve shifts upward. Her heart swells. She doesn’t have a drop of Tucker blood in her veins, but she does have a Scottish thistle indelibly embedded in her skin, there for six years and counting.

She almost got it covered up. Almost. The day after she dealt Malcolm what she hoped was an evisceration he’d otherwise be proud of, Ella made an appointment at the same tattoo parlour that had inked her already. The following day, she arrived on time, sat down in the chair and rolled up her sleeve, but when she heard the needle start whirring, she stood up, left, and headed straight to Malcolm’s house to reconcile with him. Covering the tattoo wouldn’t have solved anything, even if Malcolm and Nicola really had been over for good, and in light of recent events, Ella now knows she would have regretted it.

The inherent commitment of the ink aside, holding onto a relationship was a struggle for her after what might as well have been her mother’s second divorce. She wasn’t sure if it was more frustrating for her or any of her ex-girlfriends, but she felt stuck somewhere between wanting someone to hold forever and wanting none of the responsibility that came with it.

The heart of the issue eluded her until Katie, armed with both her psychology degrees and her experience as her younger siblings’ backup parent, guided Ella to the realisation that since she and Malcolm always saw themselves in each other, Ella was afraid she might be capable of the same damage he had inflicted on Nicola, and on their family by extension. Katie made sure to talk her little sister out of the notion for good: “Other people’s mistakes are for us to learn from, Ells, not to carry around with us until we’re crushed under the weight of them.”

She’s tried to have a little more faith in herself ever since, though she’s still working on it. At least Malcolm and Nicola have finally seen that their mistakes were theirs to learn from as well.

Ella only picks up on bits and pieces of their banter in between her thoughts and text messages. Chloé is still the only one who fully believes her about the reunion, and Ben hasn’t even read about it yet. Katie has, but she’s somewhere between speechless and miffed. Getting her to see Malcolm as anywhere near worthy of her mother again might have to be a team effort.

Meanwhile, Malcolm has apparently taken an affronted stance at the news that Nicola not only kept tabs on him via his sister throughout his entire two-week stay in Dumfries but also tasked Wendy with feeding him quite a bit.

“I should’ve known there was a fucking plot afoot when she made both shortbread and Cullen skink within the first three days!”

“You needed it! You were fucking emaciated, and obviously it worked.”

“It was an invasion of fuckin’ privacy, yeh daft bint—”

“Bullshit. And you still would’ve eaten it all if you’d known.”

Nicola’s leaning against Malcolm again, and Ella suspects they’ve forgotten she’s even there. Her theory is confirmed when Malcolm, fresh out of comebacks, swoops in for a kiss that Nicola deepens with a hand on his cheek.

“Oh my God,” Ella groans. “Get a fucking  _ room.” _

Their only response is Malcolm flipping her the V’s.

“Things are definitely back to normal,” Ella mutters to herself, snapping a quick photo to send the group chat as photographic evidence with the message, “Patiently waiting for that Venmo notification, Joshy.”

She turns and calls over her shoulder, “I’ll take the hint and bugger off now. Have fun! Use protection!”

She can practically hear them both rolling their eyes at her as she starts to walk away.

“Lock that fuckin’ door behind yeh!” Malcolm calls. Ella throws the V’s over her shoulder at him just before turning the corner. She hears her mum laughing again as she heads out the way she came in.

Once she’s done as Malcolm ordered, she ignores Josh’s sore-loser whining in the group chat and makes a call as she descends the front porch steps. The recipient answers on the second ring. “Hi, Ella.”

“Malcolm’s alright, Sarah. More than alright, actually. He and my mum are back together.”

“Oh, that’s excellent.” She sounds like she truly means it. “I recognised her in the photograph.”

“What photograph?” Ella vaguely remembers it coming up earlier.

“They didn’t tell you? I found this picture in one of his coats when—”

“Why don’t you tell me this over a pint?”

Sarah’s momentary silence makes Ella’s heart race. She wonders if Sarah has concluded this is why she didn’t just text her the update on Malcolm. She wonders if it was too forward to interrupt her. She wonders if she’s delusional for thinking this might work.

“Or a coffee, or tea, or whatever you fancy,” she adds, perhaps too quickly.

Her nerves are unfounded. “Sure, that’d be nice,” Sarah says, and Ella hopes she can’t hear her sigh of relief. “Not tonight, but I could do tomorrow after work. How about cocktails? I know a good place in Battersea.”

Ella grins from ear to ear, and she’s sure Sarah can hear it in her voice.

“I’d like that. Do you do mojitos?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some things I need to mention/credit I need to give before the epilogue:
> 
> —I feel like I should apologize for that flashback before anyone comments on it. I hurt myself writing it, if that helps at all.  
> —I chose Ella's middle name deliberately and y'all get exactly one guess where it's from (hint: nothing to do with canon).  
> —The Maggie Thatcher reference is @dickovny's fault. It's how Malcolm turns himself off in the persistence-verse (which if you haven't read it, you should! Like right now!).  
> —@quietbatpeople came up with Katie's field of study, Ella's drumset and the reason she got it, and Malcolm's habit of flipping the V's at the kids for complaining when he and Nicola are snogging in front of them.  
> —Both of the above authors share responsibility for Nicola's opinions on cilantro.  
> —@SweatingHerLadyBollocksOff gets credit for Ella being queer, and I wanted to do something with Sarah's character, so voilà. Her Ph.D. is in the original Coffeeverse. Also, this is not the last you'll see of her in this fic series.  
> —The Murray kids were barely in the Coffeeverse at all, though, so the Nationalverse provided the inspiration for Ella and Katie and their relationships with Malcolm. His family living in Dumfries rather than Glasgow comes from Tricki's one-shot "The Day We Caught The Train."  
> —I googled Scottish foods while writing this and found out Cullen skink is a real name for a real thing.  
> —The whole Aristocats thing attacked me out of nowhere a few days ago and I just had to use it. If I'm going to characterize Nicola's kids, I'm going to characterize them as huge dorks. It's hereditary.


	5. this love came back to me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I think you’ve already made up your mind, darling.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which this long-winded fic finally comes to a fluffy close. Chapter title from This Love by Taylor Swift.

In the immediate (and even the not-so-immediate) aftermath of her and Malcolm’s separation, Nicola had to keep reminding herself that she hadn’t lost everything. She still had a solid list of blessings to count.

She still had the kids, all of whom were there for her after Malcolm left, knowing their mother was no stranger to disappointment but new to such a severe heartbreak. She had a job she loved and staff she could rely on. She had a therapist she could trust to listen patiently but take none of her bullshit. She had friends she’d made on her own, not just through work or a partner. She still did yoga and spoke to her mum on a regular basis. She lived in a house that was comfortable enough to alleviate just enough of her loneliness.

She accepted that even with her remaining support system and the ongoing mission of her Cabinet post propelling her forward, she might perpetually feel a little unmoored without her other half. She’d gotten so used to it that even after Malcolm kissed her, brought her home, helped her sort out their ample emotional baggage and kissed her a few more times, including in front of his favourite stepchild, it doesn’t sink in until they’re alone in the house again that she finally notices how anchored she feels for the first time in what feels like forever.

Ella’s left them alone now, but Nicola’s still staring several moments later at the place her daughter was standing, committing the last hour or so to memory. She’s here, with Malcolm, in their home, and Ella was here too, and their family of six will be fully reunited at some point soon, and she’ll get to see Chloé and hopefully Wendy in the coming weeks, and all will be right in her and Malcolm’s unfailingly chaotic world, something Nicola believed as recently as this afternoon that she didn’t deserve anymore.

Malcolm has taken the old familiar cue to simply hold her when she’s this deep in thought, wrapping his arms around her from behind. She puts her arms over his and half-expects him to rest his chin on the top of her head, but he doesn’t.

"Hell of a woman, that one," he whispers. Nicola takes his hand and lifts it to her lips, knowing he’s staring exactly where she is.

She knows both their phones must be exploding with messages from the other three kids and Malcolm’s side of the family, but she doesn’t feel like checking yet. She doesn’t feel like resuming what Ella walked in on, either.

“I’ve got an idea.”

Malcolm fidgets; she must have snapped him out of a deep reverie. “Do yeh now?”

“Don’t sound so fucking skeptical.”

He chuckles and plants another kiss on the crown of her head.

“Why don’t you pack your overnight bag and come over to my house? We can get a takeaway curry and you can spend the night.” Nicola turns and meets his familiar gaze, inquisitive and intense and ultimately devoted to her. Christ, she missed those eyes. And those eyebrows. “It’s a nice place, but I’ll admit I’ve been rather lonesome there, and I thought we could change that just once before I move out.”

He’s free to say no, and Nicola thinks for a second that he might, based on his dubious head-tilt and the way he pauses before answering.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been ‘round that part of London,” he teases, to Nicola’s relief. “Yeh might have to give me directions.”

She swats his chest playfully. “You know exactly where I live. You sent me a fucking Christmas card, which I still have, by the way. I just didn't think you wanted me to respond —"

"It’s alrigh'. I know yeh kept it. The girls told me."

"Of course they did."

She now knows, thinking back on the card hidden in a drawer in her bedroom, that he was sincere in his hope that she was happy. She had hoped he was, too. But they weren’t happy, not with all their unfinished business that could only have been resolved the way they finally did it.

“I hope yeh’ve tidied up those hedges out front.” Malcolm brings her thoughts back to the present. “They were a fuckin’ eyesore last time I saw them.”

Nicola rolls her eyes. He’d been around a handful of times within the past three years to drop off at least one of the kids, but he never once got out of his car to do so. “Why am I not surprised you developed critical opinions about a place you’ve never seen past the front sidewalk when we weren’t even on speaking terms?”

Even less surprisingly, Malcolm is not done. “And the kids said yer kitchen is too fucking small.”

Nicola is not convinced. “Really? They all said that?”

“Not  _ all _ of them. Jesus, can’t yeh save the pedantry for whatever fuckin’ speech yeh have to write tomorrow?”

She gestures at their surroundings. “It only feels small because we’re all used to this one.”

He turns his head for a cursory glance of admiration. “Fair enough.” Nicola is well aware he loves this damn kitchen and everything in it.

She changes the subject. “How did you even know I have a speech to finish?”

He looks back at her. “Do you?”

Nicola cannot remember the last time she laughed this much in such short succession. No one else has ever amused her as much as Malcolm does, willfully or not. She’d do well to hold onto him this time for that reason alone.

He grabs her hand and leads her out of the kitchen. “Other half, right, love?”

“Always.” She swipes her thumb over his knuckles as they reach the stairs and face each other again.

“So you’ll definitely come home with me?” Shit. Old habits. “I mean, not home, obviously,  _ this _ is home, I’m just saying—”

“Nic’la.” Malcolm places two gentle fingers over her lips and lowers his voice to a sultry growl. “D’you think I give a fuck which bed I wake up in tomorrow as long as you’re in it with me?”

She smiles against his fingers, and he removes them so he can kiss her again, languorously and enticingly enough that she moans when he pulls away from her. “And on that we can agree,” she nearly purrs.

She hopes he won’t (but guesses he probably will) notice that she’s slightly nervous about getting back into bed with him. They’re not exactly the same, physically or otherwise, as they were before they split. Three years is no harmless stretch of time at their ages. That said, she’s missed him sorely in every possible way, and she secretly looks forward to unveiling the scar on his abdomen from his recent surgery, if only so she can kiss it repeatedly and see how he reacts. He has it coming after years of adoring her stretch marks, which have unfortunately faded a bit since he’s last seen them.

But there’s so much more she’s looking forward to enjoying after they’ve thoroughly enjoyed each other. Falling sound asleep, limbs entangled, her head on his chest or vice versa. The light from her bedroom window warming the sheets and waking them up. Morning breath, cracking joints, pre-caffeine grouchiness.

They’ll soak it all in and bring it all back here with them.

“I should warn you it’ll be a longer commute to your office,” Nicola says as Malcolm turns toward the staircase, still holding her hand.

“I’ve thought of that.”

“Right.” Of course he has.

“At least Richmond Terrace is on the way.”

Nicola slips her hand out of his. “You should come in and re-introduce yourself to the staff. Remind them you’re not a complete bastard, just a partial one.”

Malcolm throws one of his least potent glares over his shoulder. “D’you want me to come to your place or not?”

“Oh, I think you’ve already made up your mind, darling.”

He rolls his eyes dramatically, then notices he’s halfway up the steps and she hasn’t followed him. “Aren’t yeh comin’?”

Nicola crosses her arms authoritatively. “If I follow you up that staircase and into that bedroom, there’s a very strong chance we will never come back down here.”

He grins. “Fucking tease.”

She puts on her most innocent face. “I’m just saying you might have a tough time explaining to your colleagues why you’re out of the office again so soon. They might be concerned about you. Mine would definitely be concerned about me.”

She’s right, but so is he.

“Yer still a fuckin’ tease, pet,” he says, simple affection overriding flirtation.

Nicola’s expression flips from innocent to wicked, a tactic she hadn’t realised she missed using. “I know.”

She knows he’s watching her (most likely staring at her arse) as she heads for the front door and disappears from his sight. She knows he will not be upstairs longer than three minutes. She knows he’s as anxious to get on with their evening, and their restored life together, as she is.

She came back for him, and now she knows he’ll come back for her, no matter what.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap on Kiss #1 of 8! Much longer than I anticipated! Almost half the length of the Coffeeverse itself! Chapters 2 and 4 got away from me and accidentally spawned chapters 3 and 5. I should probably expect that to happen again throughout the series.
> 
> Cannot begin to say how much I appreciate all the feedback and encouragement. Really. I love all y'all not-so-quiet batpeople.
> 
> (Also I waited five chapters to shove that little Christmas card reference in here. I'm glad it fit somewhere.)

**Author's Note:**

> The concept behind this series isn't just other characters' reactions to the Malcola reunion, but also a remix of the First Kisses concept of the original work. Their first kiss at the house seemed to be the logical first step.
> 
> This fic wasn't going to be a multi-chapter until suddenly it was. I've gone from Rambly Fic Commenter to Rambly Fic Writer. No regrets. (OK, maybe a few. Whatever.)
> 
> My Malcola fic writing style so far has been "excessively verbose analysis of Malcolm's emotional state while he and Nicola just hold each other — oh, and it's a sequel to someone else's work." I'll branch out in future installments.
> 
> Fic title comes from Can We Hang On? by Cold War Kids.


End file.
